Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

Right grave and honorable, that importeth much—

‘Evil be to him,’ it saith, ‘that evil thinks.’”

Elizabeth was distinguished for loving to hold newly-chosen knights in suspense, before she ratified their election by her approval. The anniversary banquets too fell into disuse during her reign, and she introduced the most unworthy knight that had ever stood upon the record of the order. This was Charles IX. of France. On the other hand she sent the Garter to Henri Quatre. He was the last French monarch who was a companion of the order, till the reign of Louis XVIII. On the day the latter came up from Hartwell to Stanmore, on his way to France, at the period of the first restoration, the Prince Regent invested him with the brilliant insignia at Carlton House. It was on this occasion Louis XVIII. observed that he was the first King of France who had worn the garter since the period of Henri Quatre. Louis had erased his own name from the Golden Book of Nobility of Venice, when he heard that the name of Bonaparte had been inserted therein. He, perhaps, would have declined receiving the Garter, if he could have foreseen that the royal niece of the Prince Regent would, in after years, confer the order on the imperial nephew of Napoleon.

The period of James is marked by some pretty quarrels among the officials. Thus at the installation of Prince Henry, there was a feast which was well nigh turned into a fray. At the very beginning of it, the prebends and heralds fell to loggerheads on the delicate question of precedency. The alms-knights mingled in the quarrel by siding with the prebends, and claiming the next degree of precedency before the heralds. Reference was made to the Earls of Nottingham and Worcester. The referees adjudged the heralds to have right of precedency before the prebends. Thereupon the proud prebends, oblivious of Christian humility, refused to go to church at the tail of the heralds. The latter went in exultingly without them, and the prebends would not enter until a long time had elapsed, so that it could not be said they followed the gentlemen of the tabard. The delicate question was again angrily discussed, and at length referred to the whole body of knights. The noble fraternity, after grave deliberation, finally determined that on the next day of St. George, being Sunday, in the procession to the church, the alms-knights should go first, then the pursuivants of arms, then the prebends (many of whom were doctors of divinity), and finally the heralds. The latter were cunning rogues, and no inconsiderable authority in matters of precedency; and they immediately declared that the knights had decreed to them the better place, inasmuch as that in most processions the principal personages did not walk first.

Of the knights of this reign, Grave Maurice, Prince of Orange, and Frederick the (Goody) Palsgrave of the Rhine, were among the most celebrated. They were installed in 1613, the Prince by proxy, and the Palsgrave in person. A young and graceful Count Ludovic of Nassau, was chosen at the last moment, to represent the Prince, whose appointed representative, Count Henry, was detained in Holland by adverse winds. “The feast,” says an eye-witness, “was in the Great Hall, where the king dined at the upper table alone, served in state by the Lord Gerard as Sewer, the Lord Morris as Cupbearer, the Lord Compton as Carver; all that were of the order, at a long cross table across the hall. The Prince by himself alone, and the Palatine a little distance from him. But the Count Nassau was ranged over-against my Lord Admiral, and so took place of all after the Sovereign Princes, not without a little muttering of our Lords, who would have had him ranged according to seniority, if the king had not overruled it by prerogative.”

Wilson, in his history of James I., narrates a curious anecdote respecting this Grave Maurice and the ribbon of the order. “Prince Maurice took it as a great honor to be admitted into the Fraternity of that Order, and wore it constantly; till afterward, some villains at the Hague, that met the reward of their demerit (one of them, a Frenchman, being groom of the Prince’s chamber) robbed a jeweller of Amsterdam that brought jewels to the Prince. This groom, tempting him into his chamber, to see some jewels, there, with his confederates, strangled the man with one of the Prince’s Blue Ribbons; which being afterward discovered, the Prince would never suffer so fatal an instrument to come about his neck.”

James, by raising his favorite Buckingham, then only Sir George Villiers, to the degree of Knight of the Garter, was considered to have as much outraged the order as Henry VIII. had done by investing Cromwell with the insignia. Chamberlain, in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, says, “The King went away the next day after St. George’s Feast, toward Newmarket and Thetford, the Earl of Rutland and Sir George Villiers being that morning elected into the order of the Garter, which seemed at first a strange choice, in regard that the wife of the former is an open and known recusant, and he is said to have many dangerous people about him; and the latter is so lately come into the sight of the world, and withal it is doubted that he had not sufficient likelihood to maintain the dignity of the place, according to express articles of the order. But to take away that scruple, the King hath bestowed upon him the Lord Gray’s lands, and means, they say, to mend his grant with much more, not far distant, in the present possession of the Earl of Somerset, if he do cadere causâ and sink in the business now in hand.” The last passage alludes to the murder of Overbury.

The going down to Windsor was at this time a pompous spectacle. The riding thither of the Knights Elect is thus spoken of by a contemporary: “On Monday,” (St. George’s day, 1615), “our Knights of the Garter, Lord Fenton and Lord Knollys, ride to Windsor, with great preparation to re-vie one with another who shall make the best show. Though I am of opinion the latter will carry it by many degrees, by reason of the alliance with the houses of the Howards, Somerset, Salisbury, and Dorset, with many other great families that will bring him their friends, and most part of the pensioners. Yet most are persuaded the other will bear away the bell, as having the best part of the court, all the bed-chamber, all the prince’s servants and followers, with a hundred of the Guard, that have new rich coats made on purpose, besides Sir George Villiers (the favorite), and Mr. Secretary—whose presence had been better forborne, in my judgment, for many reasons—but that every man abound in his own sense.” James endeavored to suppress, in some measure, the expensive ride of the Knights Elect to Windsor, but only with partial success. His attempted reform, too, had a selfish aspect; he tried to make it profitable to himself. He prohibited the giving of livery coats, “for saving charge and avoiding emulation,” and at the same time ordered that all existing as well as future companions should present a piece of plate of the value of twenty pounds sterling at least for the use of the altar in St. George’s Chapel.

Charles I. held chapters in more places in England than any other king—now at York, now at Nottingham, now at Oxford, and in other localities. These chapters were sometimes attended by as few as four knights, and for the most part they were shorn of much of the ancient ceremony. He held some brilliant chapters at Windsor, nevertheless. At one of them, the election of the Earl of Northumberland inspired a bard, whose song I subjoin because it is illustrative of several incidents which are far from lacking interest.

“A brief description of the triumphant show made by the Right Honorable Aulgernon Percie Earl of Northumberland, at his installation and initiation into the princely fraternity of the Garter, on the 13th of May, 1635.”